I’ve been in a state of shock...

...which is why I haven’t posted to mikalinphilly for a while. See, I'm so not in Philly at the moment it’s shifted the whole way I think. Posting to a blog seemed rather disconnected from the green wall of forest and lake outside.

All my life I’ve been an urban person. Indianapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia. As each decade passed, I found myself living ever closer to the core of whatever city I called home. Then fate brought us to Southern Illinois and now to our serene home on Lake Chatauqua and I’m doing something I always said I wanted to do—live a rural, quiet life.

Our cell-phones hardly work, so we’ve started to use the VoIP line more. Fortunately, the rather hill-jack seeming cable company (headquartered in some small town in Kentucky I’ve never heard of) installed internet service that is flawless—much better than the spotty Mediacom connection we had when we were in town. That’s a good thing because I depend on the internet for my livelihood.

My new office is almost completed. I painted it a quiet celadon green and the light filters in through a wall of windows overlooking the lake. I positioned the small desk where I work on my laptop so it faces those windows, and every now and then I look up to watch birds in the trees near the deck. At night the bullfrogs start their croaking. It’s outrageous. Sometimes it’s so rhythmic it sounds like a jazz riff.

Today I built an enclosure for the compost pile near the garage, and threw in all the watermelon and canteloupe rinds and Fair Trade coffee grounds that had been accumulating since we moved in. It was impractical to have a compost pile in Philly.

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